Room on the Roof

A kind of artistic residency was created on the top of the De Bijenkorf department store in Amsterdam. Located on a narrow tower, overviewing the Dam square, the small studio was remodelled with a project by the Dutch interior designers i29.

Room on the Roof is promoted by De Bijenkorf together with the Rijksmuseum, and is engaged in promoting the work of invited artists, national and international. Every artistic work will be exhibited to the public, and can have diverse forms of expression, depending on every artist's desire.

Maarten Baas was the first invited artist, and developed work around the concept of time (a theme he explored previously). Entitled My Latest Work, it has a performative side, where Baas puts himself to the frustrating task of copying the time from a clock in real time. «Every time I finish a drawing, the time shown on the clock has caught up with the drawing. A performance can be seen in the display window entailing a person continually hanging up my latest work and then destroying it a minute later. A new drawing of the clock showing the current time is repeatedly hung in the window», explains Baas.